Well, hello again, friends! I have another cleaning tip for you today. A few weeks ago, I posted about all the great ways to organize your make-up. As I looked at my make-up and brushes, I realized my own great need to organize and clean them. Most of my cosmetics fit nicely in one little travel bag that I store underneath the sink, but the bag itself is dirty and I don't even remember when I cleaned my brushes last. I don't wear make- up everyday, but when I do, I want it to be fresh and clean. How can I want a fresh and clean look if my make-up brushes are dirty and gross. They were really, really bad! Yikes on me! But no more! Today, I'm going to tell you about how I cleaned them with ingredients most of us have at home.

I researched and found several different cleaning methods for make-up brushes. I narrowed it down to what seemed best, and I'll be showing you two different methods today. They both worked really well, but I did prefer one over the other and will most likely repeat it from here on out.

First, take a look at my dirty brushes. Oh the shame and horror!

But today, they look like this!

So much better! And it was easy to do!

Here's what you'll need for the first method.
1 cup of warm-hot water
1 tablespoon of blue Dawn Dish soap
1 tablespoon of vinegar.

Mix the ingredients together and drop just the brush hairs into the mixture. You're not supposed to drop the whole brush into the mixture like I did below. Oops!

The metal part of your make-up brushes, called the ferrule, should not be sitting in water. It breaks up the glue and your brush may fall apart. Again. Oops! Instead, just swirl the brush around in the mixture. The sea blue mixture will turn immediately depending on how dirty your brushes are. Mine were really, really dirty. Did I mention that already?

After you've swirled the brushes around a bit and the water gets dirty, rinse them off under running water. Pat dry with a paper towel, reshape, and set them on a plate or towel to dry. When I did this, I could see I still had make-up in my brushes.

So I decided to repeat the process...

until they came out clean.

I had to make a few batches of the cleaning solution to clean just these four brushes.

Mix equal parts olive oil with the dish soap. I used a tablespoon of each and had plenty left over.

sorry for the fuzzy pic-eeek

Dip your dirty brush into the solution.

Wet your hand with a little bit of warm running water and begin to rub your wet hand with the brush hairs.

It will be as if you're massaging your hand with the brush, and this really gets out the dirt quickly.

After both methods I lightly towel dried the brush hairs and set them down to dry. Don't set them standing up to dry. The water can do damage to the brush and break it apart.

I also cleaned the handles with a wipe. This was so badly needed. Shame. shame. shame.

Both methods cleaned the brushes really well, but the mixture of olive oil and Dawn also softened my brushes. It may seem weird to use olive oil for cleaning brushes, but many women around the world commonly use olive oil to clean their faces. The benefits of olive oil are amazing and go beyond just cooking.

Before

After

Also, I only use blue Dawn. People ask all the time if they can use another dish soap, but to be honest with you I wouldn't recommend it. There's just something about the original blue dawn that cleans just about everything, and if it's good enough for scientist and vets to use to gently clean the animals who were caught in the oil spills, then I'm good with it too.

After cleaning my brushes, I organized and set them up all pretty like so. It feels great to have clean brushes again. I loved my results with both methods but prefer the cleaning with olive oil. Hope you found this post helpful. Have a great day!